Pet Shop Boys: Super review – hands-in-the-air gems and the rest

Nostalgia is a powerful tool in today’s music market, selling things back to their original markets in repackaged form, pulling in later adopters along the way. Into this fray of reformations and homages drops a new album from the doggedly evergreen Pet Shop Boys. It arrives on the back of a single, The Pop Kids, that trades hard on warm, fuzzy feelings for clublands of yore – the 90s to be precise – and a symposium on their work at Edinburgh University, which recently sought to endow The Pet Shops Boys’ three-decade marriage of art to pop with the kind of highbrow love afforded to the likes of Bowie. (Sample lecture: “Between revivalism and survivalism: the Pet Shop Boys’ New York City Boy, disco pastiche and the haunting of Aids”.)

Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have a complex relationship with nostalgia. They never split up just to get back together to maximise the reunion dollar; they certainly don’t have to play arenas as part of some 80s package tour.

Thirty years and a week on from the release of Please, their hit debut album, Tennant and Lowe sound largely as they always have, a sound both instantly recognisable and surprisingly elastic in its references. On Super, Twenty-something sympathises with the plight of London’s young – no hope of a mortgage, despite working all hours for a startup – with a tune seemingly inspired by Metronomy.

Their last album, 2013’s Electric, was their most successful in some time, and Super continues their relationship with the producer Stuart Price (Madonna, Take That). Lowe describes Super as “Electric, only more so” – an all-electronic album (none of Elysium’s orchestrations) that edits down strains of club-pop, electro, rave and techno, quoting “the best bits” (as the lyrics for The Pop Kids has it).

The Pop Kids is delivered as autobiography, but the love song that Tennant intones in his velour drawl is years too late for him. It is, in fact, a hymn to poptimism, to going out five nights a week. Most people who have queued up for a night of tinnitus and abandon will find themselves in it somewhere. The track before, Happiness, goes harder, with smacked-bottom beats rubbing up against an upbeat existential lyric. The arpeggiating machine solo between the 2.26 mark and the 2.56 mark is a particular joy.

Super’s first half euphorically lives up to the title, tossing out gem after gem, making you nostalgic for the days where erudition in pop wasn’t so rare. The Dictator Decides finds Tennant in storytelling mode, imagining what it might be like to be a crap dictator, weary of playing the strongman-demagogue. Super’s side one is definitely retro, in that it sounds like the Pet Shop Boys rather than Zayn Malik. But its hands are in the air, its shirt a distant memory.

The second half loses momentum slightly. Songs such as Undertow and Say It to Me see Tennant and Lowe coasting on overfamiliar autopilot. A 21st-century approach is useful here – park the nostalgia and just download the best bits.